


Feasting Famine

by viceindustrious



Category: Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Genre: Advent Challenge 2010, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-20
Updated: 2011-06-20
Packaged: 2017-10-20 14:24:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/213714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viceindustrious/pseuds/viceindustrious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coward doesn't eat now unless it's from Blackwood's hand</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feasting Famine

**Author's Note:**

> Written for day one of the adventchallenge. Prompt: Food. (Well, feeding kink :D) Kindly supplied by the_me09 ♥ .

Snow suffocates the world slowly, flakes of ice as thin as eyelids, as bright as the moon-light of Coward's eyes.

Blackwood can see the fierce, strong star that beats in Coward's breast refracted in his gaze just like the sun is caught, dazzling, in the frost that decorates their windows. Coward's heart runs fast, birdlike. It thrums beneath Blackwood's hand when he touches Coward's chest, when his fingers splay across the hard, pronounced lines of Coward's breastbone.

In the garden, almost everything is white. The snow has wrapped up the lawn, the hedges, the borders of the little cobbled path that runs from the patio. Colourless and smothered and cold and alone, things that once touched the air are no longer able. Coward smiles when Blackwood tucks the scarf more closely around his neck and then feeds him a square of dark, dense gingerbread from his fingers.

When Blackwood lays his hand on Coward's chest the skin that touches his fingertips is delicate, stretched like gossamer over his bones and very hot. Almost translucent, he can see the spider web of veins running under Coward's skin.

Sometimes Coward will stand naked in front of one of the long, clear mirrors in the bathroom and run his hands over his own flesh. Pinch at the skin below his belly button or the sides of his waist, the tops of his thighs. He plucks himself black and blue this way. Black and blue, purple, red and green and yellow. He turns and stares at his profile, brows knitted, rubbing his stomach, he stretches up onto the tips of his toes and inhales so his ribs stand out from the concave of his belly like his body has been carved with an overly zealous sweep of a dagger.

Coward grins when Blackwood feeds him chocolate strawberries from the tip of a knife, running his tongue along the edge of the blade with a wild kind of mischief. He'll follow the length of iron with the flat of his tongue and then kiss the wedge of skin between Blackwood's forefinger and thumb to suck away a spot of chocolate.

Blackwood remembers the first time he saw Coward, reaching down into the mess of crimson opened up between the pretty pink hills of a girl's breasts. Scraping his fingernails along a curve of bone. The way his lashes fluttered, his lips parting.

"It's beautiful," Coward says.

And sometime or other he decides he wants to strip away the skin and blood and sinew from a pair of hips, touching the jutting bones of his own pelvis as he says so. He says something about ice cream, about a pale, soft scoop of vanilla but Blackwood was watching the way Coward's fingers were dancing across his own hips and can barely recall the words.

The realities of thawing out a skeleton from its cover of flesh and fat were more unpleasant than either of them had anticipated. Though it upset Coward more than Blackwood really understood. He knows that was when Coward stopped eating. Leaving the bones to soak to clean them, water and soap. Grease rising thick and oily to the surface of the basin, a rich, unwholesome smell. Peroxide later.

Coward doesn't eat now unless it's from Blackwood's hand. _Won't_ eat, unless it's from Blackwood's hand.

He doesn't dare say a thing unless Coward notices and that stops too. He waited once, kept a watch of three days of fasting on Cowards part. Not one thing passed his lips, save for the kisses he'd steal greedily from Blackwood's mouth, dancing up to him on light, unsteady feet and wrapping his thin, warm arms around him.

The blue of Coward's eyes seem to flare brighter as he burns his own body up for fuel. He bites at Blackwood's shoulder when he writhes beneath him in bed and licks the speckle of blood from his teeth with relish.

Now Blackwood keeps sugared almonds on the bedside table and places them, one by one, on Coward's tongue while he reads _Antigone_ aloud. As his fingers grow damp and sticky with sugar, Coward laps them clean, thoughtless and content as he hugs Blackwood's arm to himself.

He instructs the cook on what to bake. Little fig pies, fried in oil and basted in honey. They leave greasy smears around Coward's mouth that remind Blackwood of the slippery skin floating above the bones of some nameless beggar woman before Coward opens his mouth wide for more and the smell of cardamom and cloves vanishes the memory into a spiced mist.

As he lays sprawled beneath the the bedclothes, Coward's breath comes quick and shallow, hardly enough to disturb the duvet at all. The window pane is cold under Blackwood's palm. Some kind soul, (neither he nor Coward, Blackwood is sure, perhaps one of the serving girls) has hung some little balls rolled from suet and kitchen scraps out on the bird table. The robins, chests blazing scarlet, are too light to leave their footprints scattered behind them.


End file.
